Get 'In the Loop'

OK, you might not know In the Loop. The somewhat improvised, very funny film made slightly more than $2 million at the box office this summer—perhaps because the timing wasn’t right: Americans were feeling too optimistic about Washington to spark to this dark satire, which stars James Gandolfini as a Pentagon hawk. The DVD is out tomorrow and, well, the timing feels just right now.

Armando, what surprises me most is that you came to Washington to research this script.

AI: Yes, I met up with people at the State Department, the Pentagon, the Senate.

Under what pretense? "Hi, We’re gonna make a movie that completely makes fun of you and how your offices handled Iraq. Mind if we look around?"

AI: Well, yes! I said, I’m making a comedy set behind-the-scenes in Washington during the lead up to a war. It’s not a documentary. I’m not out to name names. I’m not out to destroy careers. I wanna know from you the boring stuff, the day to day: What time do you get in? What time do you go home? What’s your office like? What’s the sort of people you work with? But in the course of doing that you do get the stories of what really went on, and realize that a lot of it is to do with petty politics, with people not speaking to other people, and ambitious people badmouthing other people. I just took those aspects of that story home and we fed it into the script. And that’s how we plotted the movie.

Peter, were you involved in the research as well?

PETER CAPALDI: No, no. We were all happy for Armando to go and do that.

How did those contacts in Washington react when the movie was released?

AI: We showed it in Washington and invited them all along. I mean, They laughed all the way through it. It was slightly chilling in a way, but they certainly felt that we had got it very accurately.

We should probably address the language in this film, which is fairly dirty. It’s certainly the first time I’ve heard someone referred to as a "Nazi Julie Andrews." Any chance she’s responded?

PC: She’ll take what she can get.

Do you watch much of The Daily Show? It seems like Jon Stewart wants us to be better people. But your movie—which is sort of like The Office set in the Beltway—says we’re getting what we deserve.

AI: When you see Washington portrayed in the cinema, it’s either as a sort of noble, heroic institution, or as a sinister, corrupt, conspiratorial place. Whereas in fact, seeing as being a little tawdry, untidy and dysfunctional, dull, was what I encountered, and I just thought it was interesting to portray that, really.

What’s the temperature in the UK right now regarding Obama and healthcare?

PC: Well, we’re very upset we’re being attacked by Americans. Our national health service is being attacked as a model of disaster.

Set the record straight: What should we expect should we get universal health care?

AI: You’re not gonna get committees deciding which old people to be shot.

PC: You will have free health care, and you have to accept that sometimes it’s not all going to be perfect, because it’s an enormous responsibility, and an enormous job and an enormous machine to set up. But as an idea, and as a concept, it’s an extremely civilized one.

In the Loop grew out of a TV show you’d made for the BBC called The Thick of It. At one point, CBS made a pilot for a U.S. version—which is now dead. There was talk that HBO might step in. What’s the latest with that?

AI: HBO has asked me to write a script for Washington based political comedy, which I haven’t started yet. I’m writing two scripts for HBO. I just finished the first one, which is about something completely different. If they like it, we’ll then shoot the pilot.

What’s this one about?

AI: This is based in the world of the Internet start-up. It’s about young twentysomethings who run a website that potentially is worth billions—but who have no money.

What about the world interests you?

AI: The fact that, potentially, it’s so global. And yet fundamentally it’s just some people who are quite young who don’t quite know what to do next and who might just be sitting in a room full of bos. I like that peering behind the veneer of something that looks very imposing and discovering it’s just little people running around.

That’s similar to In the Loop.

AI: During those scenes in Washington, I said to Peter and to Tom Hollander, ’Remember the first time you—as an actot—went to Hollywood, and you were so excited and you had lots of meetings and everyone thought you were great, and you went home empty, and feeling a little bit soiled?’ That’s what it is. That is how Tony Blair behaved. He just lost his composure and got a little bit star-struck because he was in the Oval Office and on the world stage and therefore they didn’t really make much of an attempt to have an impact.

I love that James Gandolfini is doing comedy now. For an imposing guy, he’s very funny.

AI: There’s an air of slapstick visual comedy about him that he does. He told me he was actually a fan of W.C. Fields, and he watched all his movies. There’s a deleted scene that he did where he and Karen [a U.S. official] go out for a pizza. When we were shooting it, he was doing all sort of comic things like getting oil stains on his sleeve and having to use a serviette to clean it. And you could just see him timing it to just get all the mechanics of the food business.

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